"How do you pronounce your/his/her name?"
The initial scope of the project is to gather and disseminate data from primary sources as study aids. We report the results below:
- Fan, Yanqin 范延琴
- Fabio Ghironi
- Lee, Jihyung 李 志炯
- Tan, Xu 谭旭
- Wen, Quan 溫泉
(Incidentally, what grades should we assign to the following answers?)
Additional feedback from Theo is to broaden the scope of the project (Theo: "while I am at it, is it Lawa/re, or Lawarree/ ?" ). So far the pilot project has uncovered some interesting patterns, as reported below:
A) When asked to pronounce his/her own name:
1) Some (Mu-Jeung) answered with clear conviction and consistency, but some (Yoram) seemed less certain.
2) We observed significant context/location-dependent behavior: e.g.
- Fahad, Kar-yiu, Levis (+ background), Hendrik (can you tell the difference? Not everone can)
3) The scope of the confusion can go beyond just names of foreigners: e.g. Dennis
4) Evidence of "Satisficing" or tolerance, but only to a point: e.g.
- only "I hear" or "I care", but no eeker & no cancer please!
B) When asked to pronounce another colleague's name:
- on "Jacques Lawaree": attempt1, attempt2, attempt3, attempt4, vs. truth1? truth2? (it did come out in the last few seconds.)
- on "Seik Kim": attempt1, attempt2, attempt3, vs. truth (via 2ndary source)
- on "Michael Hadjimichalakis": attempt1, attempt2, attempt3, attempt4, vs. truth + whiteboard illustration mapping into Greek
- on "Haideh Salehi-Esfahani": attempt1, attempt2, attempt3, attempt4, vs. truth
- on "Theo Eicher": attempt1, attempt2, attempt3, vs. truth FOUND! from Mother Eicher (who's visiting Seattle in March 2013)
You can find more pronunciations below, including some less exotic ones. We will try to extend the study to include staff too, as theirs are not always obvious either, e.g. Giese, FarHa, Reeve-Parkah, Fendrich